“Is that true?” I asked Ellen. “Is Nathaniel right?”

She bent to her washing again, humming a tune, as if alone at the water’s edge. I looked helplessly at Nathaniel.

“Didn’t I tell you?” he asked. “She thinks her brother Joseph can work wonders and she’s depending on him to help her. That’s what’s in her mind. He’s one of the few St. Francis Indians that’s favored the American cause since the beginning; and she’s sure he’ll turn up here before long with some part of the army. So she intends to stay here, on the ground that a sister’s got a right to wait for her brother and to join him, and you’ll waste your breath trying to get her to go to Skenesboro—or anywhere else we go, for that matter.”

I turned to Ellen. “Is it true you’re staying here just to get rid of us?” But she continued to hum and to wash clothes without paying any attention to me.

“All right, then,” I said. “We’ll use force.”

At that her humming stopped and she looked at me open-eyed and open-mouthed.

“How?” she asked. “How would you use force?”

“With a rope,” I said. “Two ropes, it might be: one for the ankles and the other for the elbows.”

She stared at me incredulously; then color rushed to her cheeks, her eyes flashed, and she whispered huskily the one word “Shame!”

“Yes,” I said. “It would be a shame indeed for a woman who’s joined an army to be so insubordinate that she’d need to be tied elbow and ankle and put into a boat because she wouldn’t take orders.”

“Orders!” she cried, and jumped up to face me. “From whom?”

“From me,” I told her. “You haven’t noticed it, but I’m an officer on special duty, and I’m empowered to press unattached persons into the service in order to perform a special military duty assigned to me. I’m sorry, but now that you’ve come into the field of operations, you’ll have to do your share. I don’t mean I’m so military I have no humanity left in me. I’ll leave word here for your brother, if he comes this way, that you’re at Skenesboro, because that’s where you’re going to be—and as soon as we can get our boat there with you and the ship timbers in it.”

Her eyes, fixed on mine, had become contemptuous. “I’ll not go! You and your ropes!”

“I’ll give you an hour,” I said, “to finish your washing. Maybe you can dry it on the boat.”

“Never!”